Books on Making and Maintaining Friendships
scotthyoung.com
scotthyoung.com
I should add that I am thinking primarily about people who are inadvertently abrasive, as a result of clumsy interactions.
Last 3 bullets are solid. Roughly same advice I often give to junior devs.
Problem-solving/designing IQ is great, but it ain't the be-all/end-all. A lot of folks with two-digit IQs are my heroes.
Never attribute to stupidity that which can be properly explained by apathy.
We treat other very smart people as stupid when we just haven’t given them any reason at all to make them give a fuck about our pet peeves, or daily pain. Everybody has days when they are just trying to make it to 5:00. Sell me on your idea. Scolding is a weapon of last resort, and some people reach for it very early.
This single fact is responsible for so much polarization and conflict in the world. It also makes one's point less convincing, and makes people less likely to choose your side.
A lot of the times, especially online, the "scolding" is done not as an attempt to bring the other person over or make them see your side; rather, it's become a social signal to one's own in-group to say "see how committed I am to our side", and gain some cachet in the group that way. Even if it muddies the water for everyone and makes the world a little bit worse in the process.
My friend’s mom hates computers and software, but is incredibly technically competent when it comes to weaving and looms. She has fixed so many old machines, learned to do such cool stuff with them, does amazing work with dying and processing, and so on. She would strike your average tech bro as pretty clueless and out to lunch (she’s a little whacky and eccentric) but she’s so technically inclined in a different way it’s absurd.
Obviously some people are intellectually disabled and can’t do things like this, but stupid seems like a derogatory term in that context. And even then, I sincerely doubt you couldn’t find useful insight and intelligence there too.
I’d say that thinking other people are stupid is simply failing to recognize or appreciate the value other people bring.
Having said that, I’m pretty stupid so I could be wrong
> Something I’ve come to realize is that there’s a sort of irony in thinking people are stupid. It typically means you value a specific form of intelligence, and are too biased to recognize other forms when they occur in other people.
Premise is exactly that for centuries, we've measured "intelligence" in such a narrow scope focused on the foundations of industry (reading, writing, arithmetic) often at the expense of other forms of intelligence like spatial (e.g. sculptors, artists), emotional, and even dextile (I think I just made up a word?).
I have more recently been thinking about what intelligence means in this era when AI is advancing so quickly in processing information in volumes far surpassing humans ever could. I think that in the future, we'll see a realignment on intelligence.
I guess you need to practice what this suggests rather than just sharing it with someone, though. If you send someone a link of 'How to work with "stupid" people' they might think you're calling them stupid instead of trying to improve communication.
A stupid person is someone
who creates difficulties
that don’t benefit anyone
including themselves.
My social anxiety was so high, I couldn’t even get to the basic situations that are the base for all of Dale Carnegie’s book
However, another book (and mainly the exercises in that book), that helped me a lot, was The Charisma Myth, by Olivia Fox-Cabane
It has some excellent material on how to reduce social anxiety and be able to have better interactions
Highly recommend it. And if you are curious, but don’t want to commit to a whole book, just find the intro somewhere online and follow the 3 tips in there
I think you have to be in the third group for the books to be useful. You have to be able to pick out the truths and the nonsense. But also I think the nonsense is sometimes helpful to point out the truths.
Me and you could read the same book, find it useful but what we took from it was quite different because what we needed was quite different. Even though we fundamentally had the same problem.
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250333025/theothersignifi...
I suspect this is a major, yet unspoken, cognitive difference that separates the pro social from the anti social.
Further im pessimistic that any amount of self help lists and techniques can make up for what is natural to many, yet deficient in others.
https://www.neelnanda.io/blog/mini-blog-post-23-taking-socia...
tldr; taking social initiative is like a cheat code.
The easiest way to make friends is to start organizing. I started applying this approach to my social life and I created two new friends groups from scratch.
1. Me and my brother started organizing lasertag matches. Basically anyone is invited. We even post open invitation to all our friends. Right now we have 20 people in our group chat and we do lasertags + beers once a month.
2. I created a group of friends from highschool - like a reunion shit but once every month. When I reached out to people everyone was hyped. I had only one of these meetings atm but everyone was happy and said they want more. We will be having a second one soon.
If I needed more friends that's what I would be focusing on. Organizing a cyclic get together of people. It's like a cheat code for having a lot of friends.
Right now I am a bit of time constrained but I look forward to organizing something different in the future.
Would organize larger games with more notice. Anyone who watched us for more than 15 seconds would be forced to play. If they had fun, we made them sign up.
I think folks on HN would want to talk/argue about it.
“Flagged Dead” is an exceptional outcome.
That's great but what if you move to study or for a job.
When you're the new person in town you have to make new friends or be socially isolated forever.
It's hard to know how standard that actually is though, how much of the population gets to experience it that way. A lot of people grow up in situations where they feel ostracized or just don't find anyone they connect to in their peer groups, and so don't get to forge friendships at that stage.
And then there's many that go through a traumatic experience or big upheaval in their life in a way that makes it practically impossible to maintain the connections they did forge. It's true that sometimes it's those traumatic experiences or difficulties that deepen the friendship, but there's also many cases where those are so big and impactful that they alter one's identity and relationships (including friendships) forever.
It's quite mature of you to be open to the fact that the experience is different for others, that's not often the case when one gets the "default" good experience of something. Many others who get that experience tend to dismiss conscious attempts to make or maintain friendships (like in the post) as not genuine, but friendship is also a skill that some people pick up unconsciously, and others need conscious attempts to learn and practice.
See that's the problem with childhood friends, people move. Eventually it's impossible to keep in touch beyond online with more than one or two, sometimes not even that. Yearly meetups don't really do anything except make you realize that you have less and less in common each time until one day nobody feels like organizing anything anymore.
And it happens naturally as well when you go to college and likely graduate. Lot of my middle/high school connections spread out doing the same as me, finding their next step in their career. I'd be surprised if most people knew more than 1-2 people at their first job. So you gotta either work hard on old relationships from afar or find new ones.
It's especially important if you are trying to find a mate. I'm not sure I heard of many deep romantic relationships that were started virtually with no physical contact for months.
>perience and more easily when young - that's just my personal experience I know its different for others. And they cannot be primarily virtual or they wilt.
There's that too. We're social creatures and a screen can't satisfy everyone. Men in particular are also just horrible at updates. I don't know how you can communicate for 20 minutes with someone you haven't talked to in a year and casually mention "oh yea, I'm married now and am expecting a kid in 3 months". Really shows how isolated you can feel with someone you thought you knew inside out.
>I feel like if there was any sense of an intentional attempt to make friends I would push back and away. Of course your experience is different because friendships come in many forms.
Well that's the difficult part of modern friend forming. It's a two way street and we're in days where even your second place might be virtual. There's no school or parents to make people mesh together. You need not only to create events but the recipient needs energy to participate. You can do everything right but some people will simply not want to meet you halfway.
i traveled and moved around a lot, and just participating in tech meetups allowed me to make friends wherever i went without even trying.
It’s amazing how much value compounds from simply and consistently investing in your relationships over the course of your life.
Sorry, this is never going to work...